'The mainframe continues to have a vital role in the IT strategies of many of our customers, and making mainframes and distributed platforms true peers in a SOA offers tremendous benefits,' said Kristin Weller Muhlner of webMethods Inc, as her company today announced a new reseller agreement and strategic partnership with NEON Systems, known as 'The Mainframe Integration Experts.'

"NEON Systems is the widely recognized leader in standards-based mainframe integration and access," she continued. "Our partnership with NEON allows us to not only offer transactional support for mainframe environments, but also uniquely enables us to provide rich data and event-level integration as well."

Through this approach, Weller Muhlner explained, both legacy information and functionality can be more easily and fully integrated as Web services within critical workflows and business processes.

"Enterprises ultimately benefit from the use of a single, SOA-based infrastructure for orchestrating all of their enterprise resources, and the ability to extend our patent-pending business activity monitoring capabilities to mainframe-based applications," she said.

By bringing together best-in-class technology for integrating both mainframe and distributed computing environments within a single offering, enterprises can now more readily and easily incorporate their most critical computing resources within the service-oriented architecture (SOA) enabled by webMethods Fabric.

"The partnership is a combination of leaders joining forces to address mission critical business process optimization requirements for the world's largest organizations. The functional depth of the joint solution will be unchallenged by any other vendor, and the expertise supporting it will ensure the maximum reward for the lowest risk," said Mark Cresswell, president and CEO, NEON Systems.

Shadow RTE offers enterprises the ability to access, deploy and leverage critical mainframe resources as Web services via a SOA framework and as real-time events within an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA). At the same time, it also enables the use of SQL for direct enterprise access to legacy data with additional transactional support offered for screen-based applications and legacy data. By adding these comprehensive capabilities to webMethods Fabric, enterprises can more easily and effectively integrate critical applications and data from mainframe systems within their business process improvement initiatives.

Through the use of webMethods Fabric to leverage these resources in conjunction with Shadow RTE, users can also secure significantly enhanced operational control. For example, specific processes spanning both distributed and mainframe environments can now be more easily and intuitively modeled and deployed. webMethods Fabric also provides the ability to extend real-time visibility into these end-to-end business processes, enable organizations to improve business responsiveness with its predictive process monitoring capabilities. Users can also take advantage of Servicenet, the Web services infrastructure component of webMethods Fabric, to manage and monitor the performance of mainframe-based Web services in accordance with required service level agreements (SLAs).

For current webMethods users, additional benefits of the integrated offering include:

• Extended SOA deployment
  Provides on-board, bi-directional integration between webMethods Fabric and mainframe applications via Web services, making the mainframe and distributed systems peers within a standards-based SOA infrastructure.
• Real-time integration
  Enables business events which originate within mainframe applications and data subsystems to be non-invasively published to the webMethods platform, allowing the mainframe to trigger business processes in real time and participate in complex event processing, such as the patent-pending Business Activity Monitoring capabilities of webMethods Fabric.
• Standards-based access to mainframe data
  Provides access from the webMethods platform to mainframe databases via JDBC and SQL, making mainframe data transparently available to applications that require it.

These capabilities complement webMethods' existing mainframe integration functionality, which provides a very high performance, non-invasive solution for enabling on-line CICS and IMS processes to be called as Web services.

Together, webMethods and NEON offer a true cross-functional, standards-based platform that seamlessly combines SOA and EDA within a single solution. This is a dramatic improvement over traditional alternatives, which string together point-to-point and proprietary technologies as tightly coupled, costly gateways that offer limited functionality or adaptability. Additional benefits of the integrated approach include a template-based configuration model that eliminates significant custom coding typically used to define event sources and message queues.

As part of the agreement, each company has cross-certified their respective product portfolios to ensure seamless interoperability. In addition, webMethods customers will benefit from the integrated first-level support provided by webMethods for the NEON products.